Special guests Burke Holland and Harald Kirschner from Microsoft join us on this episode to share the new GitHub Copilot features coming to VS Code and beyond.

First up: agent mode is now available to all users in VS Code. GitHub Copilot gets a serious upgrade as it can now create new apps from scratch, handle complex changes to existing code across multiple files, run (and debug) tests from the command line, and guide you through its reasoning. 

Additionally, VS Code and GH Copilot now offer MCP (model context protocol) for agent mode. This means that GitHub Copilot can use context tools and services while building an application. There’s a host of already available community-standard MCP servers available on github.com or devs can build their own and GH Copilot will be able to use it to enhance its knowledge and capabilities.

Next Edit Suggestions (NES) lands in GH Copilot as well, so when devs make one change to a file Copilot predicts the changes that follow and presents them in sequence. Not only are ghost-text suggestions faster to appear to users in VS Code, but Copilot is also better at understanding what other changes are needed to support the new code.

Special Guests:

• Burke Holland, Principal Developer Advocate at Microsoft running the VS Code developer community team
• Harald Kirschner, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft for VS Code and GitHub Copilot

Relevant Links:

• VS Code Timeline view
• Burke’s Website
• Burke on GitHub
• Burke on Twitter
• Burke on YouTube
• Burke on TikTok
• Burke on LinkedIn
• Harald’s Website
• Harald on GitHub
• Harald on Twitter
• Harald on LinkedIn

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Apple AirPods Pro Gen 2
• Jack - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3
• TJ - Trip to the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park
• Burke - Insta 360 webcam
• Harald - Springtime in CA

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Next.js had a security vulnerability scare last week due to an internal header in its middleware that allowed for skipping middleware (like auth validation) before reaching routes. The Next.js team responded quickly and patched the security holes, but this serves as a reminder to stay vigilant, keep dependencies updated, and implement multiple layers of security.

Michael Jackson, co-founder of Remix and React Router, is calling it quits for Remix support React Server Components. Lots of React-based frameworks built prior to RSCs have been struggling to support the new paradigm shift - and lots of devs have bemoaned the fact because of the added complexity it introduces, and MJ is over it. This isn’t the first time framework authors have made bold claims to not support new breaking changes, so we’ll have to wait and see if he sticks to it.

Rsdoctor, a build analyzer tool by ByteDance, has hit v1.0. Rsdoctor goes beyond other build analysis tools offering a visual view of the build process and smart analysis to help dev teams identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and improve overall engineering quality.

News:

• Paige - Rsdoctor 1.0 is available now
• Jack - Remix bailing on RSC?
• TJ - Next.js’s security vulnerability

Bonus News:

• Redwood JS enters maintenance mode
• Browser Use Raises $17M

Fire Starters:

• CSS interpolate-size: allow-keywords

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Mythic Quest TV series
• Jack - Relearning guitar and the Katana Go headphone amp
• TJ - Open AI image generation and Studio Ghibli

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Web app bundler Parcel adds support for React Server Components, including a repo of example apps for developers to reference. Although not specifically aimed at framework developers it seems like that’s the audience that would benefit most from this new feature in Parcel.

CodeSandbox enters the AI game by teaming up with AI hosting platform Together AI, and launching CodeSandbox SDK. CodeSandbox SDK will allow developers to programmatically spin up AI sandboxes just like they can spin up microVMs today to run web app sandboxes in the cloud on CodeSandbox.io. 

Netlify inks a deal to become the official deployment partner of TanStack Start. Deploying TanStack projects on Netlify will mean: no config files needed, access to Netlify serverless functions, the reliability of Netlify’s global edge network, and the developer tools we know and love like instant previews and automated workflows.

News:

• Paige - CodeSandbox joins Together AI and launches CodeSandbox SDK
• Jack - Parcel RSCs
• TJ - TanStack + Netlify Partnership

Bonus News:

• Google Acquires Wiz for $32 billion
• Oxlint Beta is ready to replace ESLint

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Formula 1: Drive to Survive S7 
• Jack - Mushroom outdoor solar lights
• TJ - Michael Jordan-shaped Cheeto up for auction

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

The TypeScript Compiler (TSC) is getting a major port to Go. Go’s support for concurrency and efficient memory management convinced the Microsoft team to port the code over and should result in as much as 10x faster builds in the future. Expect a feature-complete implementation towards the end of 2025, and the first major release of the native compiler to be TS 7.0 after that.

OpenAI has released new APIs to make building agentic apps even simpler. A new Response API, built in tools like web search and file search, an Agents SDK to orchestrate agent workflows, and observability tools to trace and inspect those workflows round out the offerings for empowering autonomous agents to accomplish more tasks.

Developer Aiden Bai’s back in the news with a new site called same.dev that claims to “one-shot” clone any site. Just enter a site URL into the input and it will return React, Tailwind, and Shadcn UI code. It’s pretty unreal.

News:

• Paige - OpenAI: New Tools for Building Agents
• Jack - same.dev 
• TJ - TypeScript ports compiler to Go for 10x faster builds

Bonus News:

• Apple delays upgraded Siri

Fire Starters:

• HTML Data List element

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Under desk heated footrest
• Jack - Jamstik Standard MIDI Guitar
• TJ - Charizard Cheeto

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

The Tanner-verse expands again, as TanStack Form announces v1 just two years after Tanner Linsley began work on it. Out of the gate, TanStack Form supports React, Vue, Angular, Solid, and Lit. 

ByteDance (yes, that ByteDance) has released a React Native competitor named Lynx. Lynx is a new JavaScript framework that allows you to write apps that run across iOS, Android, and the Web, and it’s already being used in production TikTok apps.

VS Code’s February release had some major AI highlights this month. Preview access to the latest ChatGPT 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7 models for GH Copilot, the ability to attach images, GH problems, and entire folders for context, and improvements to Agent Mode. 

News:

• Paige - VS Code Feb highlights
• Jack - TanStack Form hits v1
• TJ - Lynx

Bonus News:

• Tailwind UI becomes Tailwind Plus
• Vibecoding

Fire Starters:

• Invoker Commands API

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Visiting Greenville, SC
• Jack - Prime Target TV series
• TJ - Pokémon GO

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Special announcement: Please take our listener survey so we can better tailor the podcast to your interests.

The web development world can’t seem to get enough of surveys, so we’ve got the first State of AI 2025 to announce in this week’s episode. The folks behind this survey are the same ones who run State of JS, State of CSS, State of HTML, and more. Take 15 minutes to let them know what AI models you prefer, which code assistants you use, and what annoys you about the state of AI today.

Along the same lines, Anthropic just released Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude Code. Claude Sonnet’s become a favorite model in the programming world and 3.7 introduces the first hybrid model that can produce near instant response or extended, thoughtful responses, depending on what the user wants. Claude Code is Anthropic’s first agentic coding tool in the form of a CLI that can search and read code, edit files, run tests, and commit code to GitHub.

Jack’s drop in replacement for the deprecated Create React App, create-tsrouter-app, now offers Solid JS support, add-ons like including Sentry or Tailwind CSS in a new project, and model context protocol (MCP) support for AI coding assistants to interact with the application.

News:

• Paige - State of AI survey 2025
• Jack - create-tsrouter-app updates (Solid, add-ons, MCP support)
• TJ - Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude CodeBonus News:

Bonus News:

• First impressions of Bolt.new + Expo
• react-scan 0.2
• React Explorer

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Breville InFizz Aqua
• Jack - Adrian’s Digital Basement YT channel
• TJ - ClaudePlaysPokemon

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Special announcement: Please take our listener survey so we can better tailor the podcast to your interests.

The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, has just released TraeAI, the newest entrant to the AI-enhanced IDE wars. Trae is also a fork of the VS Code IDE and offers many of the same AI features of competitors Windsurf and Cursor: chats, autocomplete, etc.

Recently we reported the React team agreed to deprecate starter React repo Create React App due to changes in React 19 breaking the project. Well, our very own Jack Herrington collaborated with the TanStack team to create a drop-in replacement called create-tsrouter-app that builds TanStack Router based SPA applications to give folks who previously used CRA a better option in today’s world.

Bolt.new, the browser-based AI agent continues to make news announcing a new integration with native app development framework Expo. Now, users can describe to Bolt what sort of mobile app they want in natural language, preview the code in real time on any platform, and refine their vision by chatting with the agent, and finally deploying it to the app store.

News:

• Paige - Bolt.new & Expo integrate to build mobile apps with AI 
• Jack - Jack’s very own Create React App replacement: create-tsrouter-app
• TJ - TraeAI

Bonus News:

• Microsoft Says It Has Created a New State of Matter
• ESLint supports CSS linting

Fire Starters:

• CSS text-box-trim

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Drop Stop car seat gap filler
• Jack - 3D printing
• TJ - Onyx Storm

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Please take our listener survey so we can better tailor the podcast to your interests.

It’s only mid-February and already the State of React survey results for 2024 are in! Unsurprisingly Next.js continues to dominate as the most used React-based framework and Tailwind CSS tops the charts when it comes to CSS tools and libraries.

TypeScript 5.8 beta brings TypeScript syntax one step closer to being a first-class citizen in the Node runtime. Node 23.6 unflagged experimental support for running TS files directly, but certain TS constructs like enums, import aliases and a few other things just aren’t supported. TS 5.8 beta introduces the –eraseabeSyntaxOnly flag, which will allow users to only write TS constructs that can be erased from a Node file, and will issue an error if it encounters constructs that can’t be erased cleanly.

Vercel’s AI tool v0 can now import Tailwind config and Figma files. Now, designs begun in Figma can be imported to v0 to refine without the friction of design-to-code translation and custom font weights and colors can be added to directly from a custom Tailwind config file.

News:

• Paige - TypeScript 5.8’s –eraseableSyntaxOnly flag
• Jack - v0 can now import Tailwind config and Figma files
• TJ - State of React 2024 survey results

Bonus News:

• Angular: The Documentary
• Astro 5.2

Fire Starters:

• CSS hanging-punctuation

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - A Man on the Inside TV series
• Jack - Strings of bee lights
• TJ - Heated gloves

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com

The latest wrinkle for AI coding assistant tools like Cursor and Windsurf is known as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP is an open protocol that allows users to provide custom tools and services to agentic LLMs like calling a third party weather service.

In further AI news, OpenAI has introduced a new deep research agent designed to conduct multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks. Just give it a prompt requiring research, like which model of washing machine to buy, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst.

And as it turns out, the upgrade to React 19 broke React’s own Create React App (CRA) starter repo and the community wants it fixed and deprecated, as it’s no longer the recommended way to build a new React project in the docs. Mark Erikson, of Redux fame, opens a GitHub issue in the repo suggesting updates and solutions and the official acquiesces to fix the repo for now, and deprecate it in the docs.

News:

• Paige - OpenAI introduces deep research agent
• Jack - Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Cursor and Windsurf
• TJ - Create React App and React 19 (and here’s the issue to add Astro to the React docs)

Bonus News:

• Dan Abramov leaves Bluesky
• Oracle v. Deno trademark update
• GitHub Copilot introduces agents with Copilot Edits

Fire Starters:

• CSS position sticky

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Handheld compressed air duster
• Jack - Finishing LED movie poster RPi project
• TJ - Cannondale Topstone bike

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com

A new challenger to rival OpenAI’s best ChatGPT model has arisen from China named DeepSeek R1. The reason it’s causing even more of a stir is because the creators claim DeepSeek R1 was trained for under $5M - a mere fraction of the cost of comparable models to date - and they’ve open sourced the code, the models, all of it.

In the same vein, both TJ and Paige had the chance to try out AI coding assistant Devin.ai firsthand last week. Devin is best described as an energetic junior programmer, and while it offers unique ways of interacting with it: Slack threads, PR comments, and has oversight over multiple repos so it can be asked to do things like compare documentation in one repo to SDK endpoints in another repo, its end value is still questionable.

TypeScript validation libraries have been catching on in recent years, and the creators of some of the most popular ones (Zod, ArkType, and Valibot) have gotten together to promote a common interface for libraries called Standard Schema.

News:

• Paige - Standard Schema promotes a common interface for TypeScript validation libraries
• Jack - DeepSeek R1
• TJ - Our firsthand experiences with Devin.ai and jokes about AI trained coding assistants

Bonus News:

• Matt Biilman coins the next big term in web dev experience: AX (“agent experience”)
• Vercel acquires dashboard and chart library Tremor
• Has the “Rust wave” crested?

Fire Starters:

• toReversed, toSorted, and toSpliced

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Recruit TV series
• Jack - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
• TJ - Onyx Storm

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com